When looking for primary sources or analyzing sources as a group, it's important to know how to strategically read them to understand their content. It can be difficult to fully grasp the research being presented at first glance, or understand the specialized language being used without context. The tips listed below are to help you approach scholarly articles strategically, and to provide an alternative method to help analyze and understand their findings.
The abstract acts as a preview to the article's methods and results. Starting with the abstract of an article will help you determine its relevancy to your topic, and conclude if you need to continue analyzing it, or move on to a different source.
Both the introduction and conclusion will give you additional background information on the source topic, as well as what occurred in the study. By reading the conclusion, you can determine if the study answered the original research question asked in the introduction, and read what the author's next steps will be.
Next, analyze the visual data provided in the source. Based on the visual representations, make note of your own conclusions of the data. Once you read through the entire article, compare your conclusions to what the authors saw in their results. *** This is not necessarily to conclude if the authors were right or wrong in their findings, but to allow you to think critically and understand the data being presented in the article before reading the results.
With the newly acquired context you received from reading the abstract, introduction, conclusion and visual data, read the entire article from start to finish. You still may not understand some of the terms or language, but you will have a better grasp on the source as a whole than if you read it from the start with no background information.